Minor Scales – Beginners Guitar Lessons Part 10

Hello and welcome to beginners guitar lessons part 10 – Minor Scales. Below you will find an audio guitar lesson that goes hand in hand with the written lesson. Let your fingers do the talking!

Audio Guitar Lessons Part 10 – Minor Scales

Minor Scales

We’ve discussed major scales in some detail, so let’s switch gears to minor scales. Minor scales are simply major scales starting with the sixth note in the scale. We’ll use C major as our example:

The sixth note, “A” in our C major example, is the relative minor. So to play the scale, we simply play all the notes in order starting with “A”. ABCDEFG – simple enough.

But of course, with most things in music, there are frequent twists to rules, and Minor Scales are no exception.

This particular minor scale: ABCDEFG, is called a Natural Minor scale, as it uses the notes within the major scale without modification. The other types of minor scales are as follows:

Harmonic Minor: Sharp the 7 note in any minor scale: ABCDEFG#A
Melodic Minor: Sharp the 6 and 7 notes in any minor scale: ABCDEF#G#A

(Incidentally, you can also see where the alphabetical logic of # and b notes is useful. “G#” leading “A” rather than “Ab” leading to “A”).

Where do minor scales fit in if all they consist of are major scale notes? That’s a great question. Minor scales create a “mood” that can be described as “less happy” sounding when compared with major scales.

Lets do a refresher on chords that work within C major:

C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bdim, C

We’ll try a chord progression beginning with C: C, G, C, F (repeat)

Now let’s do something beginning with Am: Am, Em, F, G (repeat)

Even though we’re using chords that belong to C major, we’re concentrating on using more “minor-sounding” chords to create a mood. We can use any chord within the key, but by favoring certain guitar chords, we can totally change the mood of the song.

Hope that takes some of the mystery out of minor vs. major keys. We’ll elaborate more in future lessons, but the key point to remember is: Just because a song is in a major key, we don’t have to follow any set order. Changing the chords and notes around, favoring some over others, is how we create music with a certain sound, mood, and feel.

Thanks for stopping by for this lesson on Minor Scales. Don’t forget to check out all of our previous guitar lessons, which you can find in the sidebar on the right.

Scotty Smith and Matt Mckay
Learn The Guitar Lessons © 2009